the massive wasted potential that is hulu.com.

you can consider this an open letter, i guess. it's to anyone who works in the broadcast or entertainment industry, but also to anyone who has ever downloaded or been tempted to download television or movies illegally, those who work in internet broadcasting, and those who make laws about what can and can't be done over the internet. if you're one of those people, it's time that you understand a few things about where the world is going and how people make money to produce content like television shows.

if you haven't been to hulu.com, you should check it out. it's a website where you can watch free television and movies legally over the internet any time you want! like broadcast tv, it's paid for with advertisements, most of the time you'll get about 3 commercials per episode, sometimes more for longer programs, or less if you agree to watch a long form commercial from one of the show's sponsors. the idea behind hulu is a very good one- thanks to dvds, tivo, etc. more and more people are finding that they prefer to watch television on their own schedule instead of on the fixed television schedule they previously had to watch it on. it's also very convienient for people who travel a lot because of laptops, public computers, etc. hulu.com has a feature that remembers where a user was in an episode when they are logged in that could be very nice for people with busy schedules. it also has the potential to be very good for businesses that embrace it correctly, because it creates a wider viewership and, unlike internet piracy, the companies can still make money using sites like hulu.

however, there are some problems with the service. one of them is that advertisers are not seeing why hulu.com is a good thing, and are not buying advertising on the site... i am a regular hulu.com user, and during peak times i generally see 1-2 companies' ads over and over, and during non-peak times there are many days when i watch hulu.com for a couple hours and see only ads for non-profits and psas. the second problem is that many broadcasting companies are using hulu.com as a "teaser" website, offering the first episode of a show, one episode from the show seemingly at random, the first season and not the others, or only the latest episode. i will explain why that is a problem in a moment, but, like all the problems internet broadcasting is having getting started, it all comes down to people not understanding how the average user uses the site or who the user base is.

there are some basic facts you need to understand to think about this subject:

1) there is a growing number of people who enjoy watching their "television" on their computers. connection speeds and processing power are going up, making it more and more possible for people to enjoy this new medium, and people are enjoying having control over their media in ways they previously could not. for example, people enjoy being able to watch the shows they enjoy on their own schedule, similar to the way people enjoy watching movies at home instead of going to the movie theater. being able to stop their show to go get a snack or watch a show that comes on while they are at work or a social event makes people happy. people who are only casual television watchers also enjoy being able to pick and choose the content they wish to see, instead of paying for a service like cable that gives them a lot of content they don't want as well as the content they wish to see.

2) internet downloading is not going to go away. that is not taking a moral stance on piracy. i do understand that television and film companies need to make money in order to continue to produce content. if they didn't, we'd all be watching television shows that looked very long youtube videos. what i'm saying is, people want to watch movies, television, etc. on their home computers. it is free and fairly easy for them to do so. companies already know that they can not actually stop everyone who does this from doing it, which is why they continue to engage in example making behavior through high profile court cases, and why they send letters intending to scare people to those they have caught pirating content.

the solution to this is actually easier than people think... as easy as internet downloading is, it is also time consuming and can take up a lot of hard drive space. and believe it or not, most people would rather do things legally... both to avoid reprecussions from the law and because most people already know that without monetary support for the shows they enjoy, those shows could not exist. they want to legally view their media in a digital format, but for many of the programs they enjoy watching, they are given no legal option to do so.

sites like hulu.com can help with all of these problems. most people would rather have the instant gratification of watching an ad or two in order to watch the program they want to watch when they want to watch it. the company still makes money, and the person in question does not need to use up their hard drive space. in the cases of some of the competing services such as itunes or amazon.com's video on demand (which instead of showing ads charge a small fee of about $2 per episode for content), a customer may choose to download content if they wish to or simply stream it on the website. this is also a decent business model, but still woefully underused, with a very narrow amount of content available. i am going to list the benefits to a company using hulu.com to distribute their programming, and not all of those will apply to the other business model.

in addition to making people less likely to pirate the content, hulu.com also offers some unique advantages to a program that can't be matched by traditional television or dvds.

one of these is word of mouth. several shows i very much enjoy are currently hosted or have been hosted in the past by hulu.com. one of the reasons i love that so much is because if i have a friend who i would like to share that program with, no matter where they are in the world currently, i can send them a link to the show on hulu. for example, i have a friend in florida who loves arthurian legend and celtic myth. when the first season of merlin was hosted on hulu, i sent him a link to the show. he was able to watch it within minutes. i don't know about you, but often i will see a show and forget the name of it, or the day and time i saw it. or a friend will recommend a show to me i fully intend to watch, but i forget one of those details. a person does not even need to know a person to reccomend a show for them... if someone blogs about firefly, for example, they can link to firefly on hulu for people who have not seen the show. anyone reading that can see the recommendation and immediately follow the link.

the second problem, and one many television companies who currently are using hulu incorrectly are not understanding, is the "catch up" factor. currently, many television shows take awhile to build story, gain a following, and become popular. if a show is in the second half of the second season and a friend recommends it to me, watching it on television may leave me confused. especially in the cases of dramatic shows, i may have no idea who the people are or what is going on in the plot. i may stick around and figure out what's going on, or decide to spend a large chunk of my income (usually around $30 or more.) to buy the dvd for a show i'm not sure i want to watch yet, but i may not. i may decide it's too much trouble and turn off my television, or simply not try to watch an episode of the show in the first place. (this is why i have never seen heroes.) the catch up factor can also come into play for shows that take awhile to gain momentum. a person may see an early episode of a show and dislike it, then later find out that the story gets more interesting later on and wish to watch it, only to find that it is too far in and they have no clue what is going on. if the previous episodes are on a website like hulu.com, a person can catch up to the current storyline without much trouble, which means more people viewing the program. this feature could also be useful for cancelled shows. people may still enjoy watching them and the producers of the content can still make money from them.

advertising on the internet with simple banner ads is also much less expensive than a television advertisement, although to be effective it takes more research. if, for example, you know that your program is aimed at teenaged girls, websites where teenaged girls spend a lot of their time can link to your show directly on hulu. many people are annoyed by internet advertisements, primarily because they are coded in an obstrusive manner, but also because they get the feeling "someone is trying to sell me something!" which they dislike. since hulu.com is a free service, people will not have that feeling. the content providers are making their money through advertisements, so the customer is not asked to pay and they were just recommended a program to watch that they might enjoy. if enough research is done, content providers who have a show that appeals to different groups of people or specific niches can cheaply and effectively advertise to that niche. for example... say your show primarily appeals to teenaged girls, but you also notice that it's appealing strongly to a certain group of people who are not in that age group... or perhaps a small subcultural group. buying adspace on a website the smaller group will most likely use will bring in more members of that group while you focus primarily on the larger group.

hulu.com is currently a struggling website because people don't believe use of it is widespread or that money can be made using it. while it may be true that not everyone on the internet is a regular user of hulu.com, that will most likely not be the case within a few years, and the process can be accelerated simply and easily by the content producers. an extremely simple way to do that would be adding the url to the show's page on hulu.com during the show in one of the bottom corner screen ads. this would be especially useful for people suffering from the catch up factor i mentioned above. it would also bring users to the site and make them realize that they could watch other shows from the same producers that they might also enjoy.